2008); the slaughter of his family in Westfield, in 1971, by the accountant John List (who died in prison custody in 2008 at the age of eighty-two). Noir is a highly selective art—and such brute ugliness isn’t redeemable by art.
In this volume, no work of fiction or poetry directly evokes such crude, hellish crimes, but the surreal-nightmare family snapshots of Gerald Slota’s art at the start of each section comes closest to evoking the “pure products of America” (to use William Carlos Williams’s striking phrase) from which these terrible crimes and criminals might spring.
New Jersey!—“The Garden State”—our fifth smallest state, with only Hawaii, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island below it in land mass, yet it’s the state containing the “most murderous” American city (Camden) and the state generally conceded to be, square mile per square mile, the most densely politically corrupt. (Louisiana has been, by tradition, the most corrupt of all U.S. states, but in recent years Illinois has been closing the lead.) Atlantic City, Jersey City, Hackensack, Hoboken, Secaucus, Newark, Camden (three recent Camden mayors have been jailed for corruption)—in these cities as in others corruption isn’t aberrant but rather a way of (political) life. (Why? The answer seems to be that New Jersey is a maze of overlapping and competing municipalities—556, to California’s 480—that bring with it rich opportunities for political entrenchment, deal-making, and outright thievery.)
New Jersey is among the wealthiest of states, with a per capita income that was the highest in the United States in 2000; judged by the desolation of its inner cities, it is simultaneously one of the poorest. New Jersey is a microcosm of the profoundly unequal distribution of wealth in the United States generally—within an hour one can drive from the wealthy exurbia of Far Hills and Saddle River to the dismal poverty of inner-city Newark; from the mansions of Princeton to the desperate poverty of inner-city Camden. Within an hour’s radius of Princeton University, the most heavily endowed (per student) university in the United States, with an endowment in excess of $25 billion, are inner-city schools in everdesperate need of funds. Sitting between the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, New Jersey has been by tradition a heavily “organized” Mafia state, as it was at one time a northern outpost of the Ku Klux Klan, with a concentration of members in Trenton, Camden, Monmouth County, and South Jersey. (Officially, the Jersey Klan was disbanded in 1944, but a writer friend of mine, now living in Princeton, recalls her Jewish father being harassed by the Klan in the 1960s, when a cross was burned on the front lawn of his family home in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore.)
New Jersey has had a rich history of sensational crimes. Still unsolved are the Hall-Mills murders of 1922: Reverend Edward Hall was a charismatic Episcopal priest in New Brunswick, found dead with his married mistress Eleanor Mills, a singer in the church choir; Hall’s wife and two brothers were tried for the murders but acquitted, in a trial that attracted rabid national media interest. Then there is the Lindberg kidnapping-murder of 1932— The biggest story since the Resurrection , as H.L. Mencken dryly remarked. After a manhunt and a badly botched police investigation, the illegal German immigrant and ex-convict Bruno Richard Hauptmann was tried, convicted, and executed for having kidnapped and murdered the twenty-month-old Lindberg baby, taken from his crib in the East Amwell country house of the Lindbergs, near Hopewell. (Though Hauptmann was found guilty, the case remains controversial among aficionados of high-profile crime.) In more recent years the “devoutly religious, family annihilator” John List accrued a high degree of notoriety by eluding police for eighteen years after murdering his mother, wife, and three children in 1971; and the